059 | User Experience Must Begin with the User | Elisabeth Bohlmann | December Labs | Studio CMO
Every time you pick up your phone, open your computer, turn on your television, wake up your tablet, or start your enabled car, you are drawn into a user experience. How quickly, easily, and intuitively you navigate to your intended result broadly determines your satisfaction.
HealthTech platforms, their sites, and their apps are often plagued with a mix of age, older tech holding on, and limits placed by regulations. How can you build an environment that builds fans instead of prompting complaints? What role does marketing play in the development of the platform itself?
UX expert and marketing veteran Elisabeth Bohlmann from December Labs explains.
About Our Guest
Elisabeth Bohlmann is Vice-President of Client Strategy at December Labs, a high-touch Design & Development firm for mobile and web products. She drives December Labs’ expansion strategy and accompanies their clients towards scalable and continuous growth. She speaks often at key industry events including CES.
She has spent more than ten years in leadership at tech, digital marketing, and international operations. She holds an economics degree from Bonn University in Germany. She’s also an accomplished musician.
She’s got real chops. She is a scrum-trained, trilingual, cross-functional marketing executive with a passion for design-thinking and integrating cutting-edge technologies into human-centered and value-driven solutions. She has developed and led projects for iconic brands such as Mattel, NBCUniversal, Food Network, and the NBA.
Tech products have come a long way, but there is still so much more to do. Your app or platform is being directly compared to Instagram, WhatsApp, Spotify, and other apps that are on your buyer’s phone. The bar is set really high. Those companies are spending millions—billions—to develop their products. You must be intentional in order to compete. —Elisabeth Bohlmann, December Labs
Links Mentioned on This Episode
The Complete Guide to Creating a Business-Building HealthTech Website
How to Build B2B Buyers’ Trust Through Exceptional CX
Don’t Leave Your Users Behind: Mapping The B2B User Experience
Five B2B Tech Websites Absolutely Killing It at User Experience
Five Drivers of Customer Experience with Mary Drumond of Worthix
How to Create an Epic HealthTech Website Resources Page
Updating Your B2B Tech Website: When, Why, and How
Listen to Elisabeth’s Band
Transcript
John Farkas (00:00):
User Experience. It is a term that we are seeing come farther and farther to the forefront. As we think about what it means to engage in the digital sphere, it’s an important component of so much of what we do in the context of marketing. It’s an important component of much of what happens on the product side. As we think about healthcare technology and how we bring that to the people that need to use it. But it’s really important to bring both of those sides along together: what the experience is and how people experience your brand from the marketing side and how that translates into and around the product experience as people begin the journey into your brand. And as important as it is, it’s unusual for people to do them both well. That’s what we’re going to be talking about today on Studio CMO.
Mark Whitlock (01:14):
Welcome to Studio CMO and you’re listening to the podcast where we help HealthTech companies improve patient outcomes by empowering them to communicate their solution in ways that capture attention, motivate, change, and speed improvements to the entire healthcare ecosystem. I’m joined today by our host, the CEO of Golden Spiral from whom you just heard, John Farkas and John, how many buttons do you estimate, or how many clicks did it take to get into today’s interview?
John Farkas (01:42):
The User Experience for this interview today was less an optimal, Mark, if I’m being honest. Absolutely.
Mark Whitlock (01:48):
Yes it was. And we hope that your experience, however, was optimal in the way that you interacted with us on your phone or on your computer, or maybe even your CarPlay device who knows, uh, Anna Grimes, my fellow co-host, is with us today. And Anna, you have been intimately involved in how our clients interact around their user interfaces and how they bring their websites to life. Haven’t you?
Anna Grimes (02:13):
I have indeed. And I can, uh, echo John’s sentiment about the user interface of the product, not always being matched with the website. But we’re working on
Mark Whitlock (02:27):
It. Yes. Right. And that’s why we’re hosting this guest today.
Anna Grimes (02:32):
And we are delighted to have Elisabeth Boldman as our guest. Elisabeth is vice president of client strategy at December Labs—I want to find out more about that name—a high-touch design and development firm for mobile and web products. She drives December Labs, expansion strategy, and accompanies their clients towards scalable and continuous growth. She speaks often at key industry events, including CES. She spent more than 10 years in leadership in tech, digital marketing, and international operations. And she holds an economics degree from Bonn Uuniversity in Germany. She’s also an accomplished musician. We want to hear those tracks pretty soon. We need to link to that in the podcast, Mark. Um, but she’s got some real chops. Um, she’s scrum trained trilingual, cross-functional marketing executive with a passion for design thinking and integrating cutting edge technologies into human centered and value-driven solutions. She’s developed and led projects for iconic brands, such as Mattel, NBC universal food network and the NBA. So we are glad to welcome you to Studio CMO
John Farkas (03:45):
Hashtag #sleepisoptional.
Elisabeth Bohlmann (03:50):
Well, I’m very delighted to be here and thank you so much for this introduction.
Anna Grimes (03:54):
Right. Great. Let’s dive in! John, we were talking about the difference between the product and the website, because we’re
John Farkas (04:03):
Coming at it from two different sides of this equation. You’re, you’re coming at it obviously from the product side and wanting to make sure that those experiences are optimized. We’re coming at it from the marketing side, wanting to make sure there’s something remarkable to market and that’s an important component. And that intersection is really critical. I’m interested to see: what are some of the hazards in the path as you’ve experienced it, as we think through user experience on the product side
Elisabeth Bohlmann (04:34):
Now, great question. And I am actually very excited to, to be speaking to you guys about this today, since my background is from marketing, really that part of the equation is what I originally focused on worked on, which was my bread and butter, you know, digital marketing. And so when I pivoted a few years back into tech, I realized how so many best practices for marketing are still relatively new when it comes to tech. So just when you think about, you know, certain press practices, as far as A/B testing, I mean, we did that 10, 15 years ago in marketing, but still these kinds of testing activities that are part of what you would call UX and software I’m user experience, which actually just kind of started to grow and like Google search results and like 2014, which is like really yesterday, basically, really show me how, yeah.
Elisabeth Bohlmann (05:23):
How there still so much room to grow when it comes to applying these kinds of best practices for marketing into the development of tech products. The other thing that I think really visualizes this is if you think about the tech products from the nineties, you know, the websites and, you know, all the bad stuff that was just really very difficult to navigate sometimes. And then not even talking, you know, getting into, um, kind of the visual it’s there. But I mean, tech products have come a long way, but still there is so much more to do. And when you are, for example, a startup and entrepreneur, and you’re building that say a mobile app, you’re getting directly compared to Instagram, to WhatsApp, to Spotify, to all the apps that everyone has on their phones, like very close to it. So the level is really high of what you’re getting compared against. And these companies are spending millions, billions and developing their products. So what do you have to do when you are, you know, as a early stage tech startup and you want to get into that field, you know, you really have to think about who you’re trying to build this for and what kind of problem you’re really trying to solve. And again, I think that’s really much related to where you’re coming in from the marketing point, because those are also the first questions that you’re going to ask when you’re working with someone.
John Farkas (06:38):
It was just talking about that very thing. In fact, that conversation made its way front and center to some positioning work that we were doing from an organization that we’re working with right now, talking about how, no matter where they’re coming from users are hypersensitized to these multi-billion dollar platforms that we use every day that have conditioned us to what to expect in the context of a digital experience. It has to be hyper intuitive. It has to fit how we think it has to look the way we expect and the journey needs to be apparent. Right? And it’s exactly what you were saying. I mean, that conditioning, if we don’t hold that front and center and say, no matter what we want to think, that is the expectation that people have when they are engaging with us, because the bar set we’re hyper conditioned. And if you’re not taking that into account, you’re going to lose trust at the end of the day,
Elisabeth Bohlmann (07:40):
Right? And you really have to combine those learnings that you can take from these apps that have been very successful. And that really, again, you know, spent a lot of money and time on optimizing their experience, take those best practices and combine them with a unique value proposition. I think that is kind of, you know, the overall path of success that you have to go down. If you want to build a product that today can find its way onto a user’s smartphone or computer.
John Farkas (08:09):
First thing I’m hearing is, you know, if I’m going to start an outline here, first, we need to understand the user’s expectations. We have to begin with the fundamental understanding that they’re coming to this interaction with a bar set. And if we are at, or above the bar, we win. If we’re below the bar we lose. And that loss is hard to forgive. It’s hard to overcome. And so step one, let’s understand, this is an important conversation. There’s expectations here. We want to meet, okay, we have that expectation. We’re moving into how we frame this product market presence. Let’s talk about some of that process. Do we approach? And you know, we’re not, obviously we’re talking to people with a wide variety of different applications and for how they’re going to bring this forward. So we can’t get in there too close. But one of the things I know we talked about before we went on the recording is the understanding that user experience is not a one and done proposition. It is a process of learning and understanding. So let’s talk about when we are moving into creating an experience for people, how do we begin the process? What do we set forward and understanding what we need to create, to communicate and to lead people where we want them to go,
Elisabeth Bohlmann (09:38):
Whenever you’re first starting to build a tech product, and this can be, you know, a product from scratch or this can be, um, an iteration on something that you’ve already built and new features, you always have to define the scope. You have to define, you know, what you’re building and what kind of is its minimal purpose or the minimum of value proposition, the MVP to kind of set a framework there. Then I would say a second step is validate that, you know, see if you are onto something. And if what you’re planning on building is actually the right thing with the right purpose, with the right set of features, you know, more technically speaking. So one of the things that we always do at December Labs, when we get invited into that conversation is, uh, proposed, starting out with some kind of design discovery phase that where you’re actually already designing the product, but where you also constantly validate if what you’re building is the right thing, and this can be in case you already have an existing product with existing users and you can of course leverage those.
Elisabeth Bohlmann (10:39):
But if you’re just starting out or if you’re building something new, then you can also, um, source users and you don’t really have to be afraid of this to be an effort that’s not feasible, not affordable for you. Um, there are certain studies that say, you know, if you speak to at least five members of kind of the user segment that you’re trying to target, you’ll probably be able to solve for about 80% of potential problems that they might have. You know, maybe you want to speak to 10 or 15 people, but this doesn’t have to be, you know, like when we’re talking about user studies, these don’t have to be hundreds or thousands of users. So a lot is really about education and really helping startups and entrepreneurs, tech founders to understand how they can validate and how they must validate their products, their products idea before actually going into the development, because that’s really when they’re going to spend the bulk of their budget and they should, you know, rather do that carefully with a validated product.
John Farkas (11:36):
What I’m hearing is it’s important to understand that the conversation has to start and starting the conversation doesn’t have to mean that you have every single thing, figure it out all the way down the line, because if you try and do that, you’re to miss. I mean, cause it’s, it’s, it’s really important. I think about this in the healthcare sphere, you talk about the practice of medicine and the reason they call it a practice is because it is not a definitive that you can just sit down and write and prescribe people are all unique. And so we should call it the practice of user experience design, because there’s really no formula because there’s parts of it that we can’t pretend to know until we actually watch what happens in nature. And so you have to start with an iterative idea and iterative focus and know that this is going to be at process and it doesn’t ever stop.
Elisabeth Bohlmann (12:40):
I really love that analogy. Actually, I’m going to steal that from you, um, because it’s exactly that. And that’s why, and you know, these methodologies that are today being used in software design and development, uh, of design thinking, that’s why the first phase is called an understanding or a discovery phase because it is really about learning. If the kind of problem that you’re trying to solve is actually an existing problem. If the path that you’re set out to do this is the right one. If you’re targeting the right users, or if maybe there are other types of users that are more willing to use your product, there are so many different aspects and narratives really. And what I also really like about the possibilities that design thinking and UX research provide you with today is that at the end of it, you will have a clickable prototype and you will actually have a validated idea, which oftentimes can also help companies, you know, get investment. It tells a totally different story than just, you know, Hey, I have an idea and this is what I’m planning to do because instead of that, it’s, I have an idea. Let me show you how it works.
Anna Grimes (13:46):
I can see that happening quite frequently, you know, in, in healthcare, particularly when there’s sometimes a distance between the end user and the person who thought, wow, this will really make it a lot easier on the clinician. And sometimes that doesn’t quite work.
John Farkas (14:06):
We see this quite frequently because we’re an agency we end up working with a lot of organizations who don’t start as marketing focused entities, right. We start with a lot of organizations that start as product focused entities and they worked on developing a product. Then they realize, oh, we’ve got a product. We’ve got to get it to market. So how do we do that? I’m oversimplifying and not being fair. It’s not in a nutshell, that’s it. And so we have to work with them and crossing the bridge to the market and saying, okay, how do we do that? I would venture to guess, because you guys are a user experience company that you work with, folks that are kind of on the opposite side of that spectrum, where they might a more market focused, and then they’ve got to figure out how to make it work. And I think it’s pretty interesting to put forward that I think it’s important for the listeners to understand who they are in that continuum, because it’s pretty important orientation understanding of what you’re going to need to fix. You know, how you’re going to bring ends together to the middle in that regard. I’m curious what your experience has been in that realm, Elisabeth,
Elisabeth Bohlmann (15:22):
Really, to be successful when you’re working in developing and designing software products is really to understand the entire ecosystem of what you’re talking about. And that includes marketing the product that includes building the product from a technical point of view. I’m also designing the product. And as you said, uh, oftentimes, um, our clients are at different stages of, you know, understanding really that entire ecosystem. Sometimes when they have a very product focus, I would say then, yeah, the conversation is about, you know, but this is okay, so you know what you’re trying to build, but what are you going to be doing with this? Um, you know, how are you going to market this? Because also if we understand kind of the long-term plan, we can build a better product because we know where to scale it towards another typical conversation in the beginning is, you know, with a very technical co-founder, for example, that says, Hey, you know, I can throw out a lot of tech specs here for you to build something, but then the conversation goes more into well, but, you know, have you validated that don’t you wanna, you know, know first as we just talked about a couple of minutes ago, um, is that what you’re trying to do with the right thing for us really the most exciting conversations are I think when we can bring some kind of value to the table, some kind of experience in my case, you know, having worked for over a decade in marketing, that’s oftentimes, you know, where kind of my questions go towards, because again, if you can understand what someone tries to do with a product, then it’s so much easier to come up with the right strategy to build
John Farkas (16:51):
It, talk about how you all approach the iterative process and the development of these things. We talked a little bit about that and just coming up with an MVP and something, you know, a lot of the folks we might be talking to are past the MVP stage. They’re more in the conversation, you know, already they’ve got a conversation going, but maybe they’re not doing a good job of listening. They’ve asserted it and it’s out there. What would be some things they could do to, you mentioned AB testing, which I know a lot of people don’t do with their products. They just have it out there. It’s a thing. Yeah. So how do you facilitate the ongoing conversation, the development, the constant improvement framework, as you look at user experience?
Elisabeth Bohlmann (17:40):
I think the first thing to understand this, that any kind of software is almost like a living being, meaning that it’s not that you just develop it and it once, and then it’s done, there are so many things that you have to keep on a consideration and it can start with, you know, that you will need regular updates because the operative systems of, for example, iOS and apple and Android will need to, you know, require certain fixes, certain updates. There might be a new trends, new tendencies, and some apps. For example, at some point a few years ago, started to work on dark mode for their apps, which, you know, they didn’t have before, especially in the health wellness, fitness space. Um, you know, the integration with Apple Health Kit with Google Fit is something, you know, that companies might have wanted to add them to their existing products.
Elisabeth Bohlmann (18:25):
And I’m not even talking yet about, you know, new feature development and continuing to grow your apps. There’s really a broad array of different things that you will have to do to keep your app to keep your product alive. And one of the best things of getting the strategy right, is, uh, listening to your users and building a product roadmap with that. One of the startups that we work with, actually not within the health space, but, um, they have an it product called lion guard in their case. For example, our team of UX researchers works very closely with their customer support team, because those are the first ones that get to hear about any types of complaints, any kinds of issues when it comes to onboarding any problems with new features. And so they are the ones that kind of feed those priorities to our UX researchers that then, um, we’re kind of in product cycles with the developers to make these kinds of things happen. That brings us again to the initial points of this conversation about, you know, listening to the user, putting the user really at the center of what you’re doing. And this can be a B to C user, a B2B user. I mean, it really depends on the product that you’re building, but you do have to make sure that you’re building this for someone and you’re building it the right way.
Elisabeth Bohlmann (19:37):
One of my favorite people on the planet is fond of saying, people don’t know what they like. They like what they know in a lot of ways, we’re breaking folks out of what they know what what’s been in the past, what they’re familiar with, what they’re comfortable with, and we’re taking them to somewhere. That’s actually the best thing for their user.
John Farkas (19:58):
What we’d like to call the from to
Elisabeth Bohlmann (20:01):
How do you help your customers break out of their bias when it comes to how things should work?
Elisabeth Bohlmann (20:09):
Hmm. Um, that’s actually a great question. And one thing that comes to mind here at seems oftentimes very trivial, but think, for example, about the onboarding experience, really the onboarding experience for any type of product, it can be short, can be long, but really sets the stage for everything that’s to come at December lapse. We work a lot with wearables with smart devices, and oftentimes the entire onboarding happens through the mobile app. You know, when you have a fitness tracker, when you have any kind of smart device, any kind of wearable, when you purchase that product, the first instruction that you have to do is download the mobile app and it will guide you through the setup. So the responsibility there of the mobile app is tremendous because as you say, you know, it’s, this is a product that people don’t know yet. This is something that they’re going to learn about. And what we also always say is that the overall product is only as good as its weakest link. So if you have a product with a really crappy mobile app, then that will probably influence the opinion of the product negatively, although the product might be great. So don’t just think about, you know, the main part and the main aspect of the usage of the product, but really think about it end to end from the beginning to
John Farkas (21:21):
The end, it really is important. We talk about this pretty frequently with our clients. It is that whole journey from when they meet to when they deploy and, and experience has to be a consistent journey. We frequently talk about how it’s important for our clients to productize their onboarding. Onboarding is a really critical link where a lot of organizations lose trust. The marketing does its job. They impress, they inspire. They tell a great story. They hand off to the sales team, the sales team pumps it up and everything’s going to be great. They jump into implementation and the wheels fall off because they haven’t done the work of making sure that the dots are all going to get connected. And the experience is going to follow through. They might have a great product. It might look great and function well. And many of our clients and many of our listeners have very complicated implementation frameworks that they have to undergo to integrate their systems.
Elisabeth Bohlmann (22:26):
I mean, we’re talking today here, you know, mainly about HealthTech, health products, digital health, and that’s really where the bar is the highest, because, you know, if it’s direct to consumer, then it’s, you know, people that are, that might be suffering from diseases that might be insensitive situations that might really, you know, need, uh, sensitive information and need to feel secure with how they would use the product. If it’s B2B, then it might still be, you know, with really high stakes involved, you know, when your physicians, hospitals, healthcare providers, and so on, all of this is even more important when it comes to HealthTech and so on. And that’s also where from our end, when it comes to software development, you know, things like HIPAA compliance, FDA approval for again, you know, smart devices or wearable devices within the HealthTech sector, come into the equation. You need a very specific skill set to make sure that you contemplate all the best practices that are already out there to building these types of products.
Elisabeth Bohlmann (23:21):
Anna, we were talking a little bit about how marketing comes into the equation late, um, all this stuff’s going on. And then all of a sudden marketing has to pick up the ball and move forward. Uh, that, that can be right.
Anna Grimes (23:36):
And, and so that was a question I had for you Elisabeth, while we know that particularly for the us market, the compliance piece is very important, but to really stand out, you really need to elevate that beyond just the compliance piece, to really matching those experiences that they’re used to having with Starbucks, that they’re now getting with their onboarding tool, when they start with a new physician or schedule a new appointment, how can organizations initiate and sustain that strong relationship between marketing and the design piece, the UX designers. I know sometimes that’s not the easiest thing to do, but it feels like we’re coming at the same problem, but perhaps from a different angle. Yeah. Actually we
Elisabeth Bohlmann (24:24):
Oftentimes work together or we try to work together with the marketing teams from our clients because they are oftentimes, you know, facing the same challenges are kind of trying to discover the same things at the very same moment. And really these two areas overlap a lot. So in my opinion, really the most efficient way to tackle these kinds of things is, you know, working together and really leveraging the skillsets of both areas. When you think more about marketing, then there’s a vast knowledge and a vast understanding of the market, um, benchmarks, um, the overall ecosystem, I would say of any kind of product and then the UX UI design, uh, designers and researchers will have more knowledge about the specific tech implementations, um, you know, and when they benchmark, um, tech products, they might look at different things than marketers, but again, there is a strong overlap. So I think working together and really knowing when these kind of areas should overlap is one of the key aspects to this.
John Farkas (25:24):
And like you said, knowing where your weak points are because in a world where we’re very conditioned for things to work and be intuitive, and to anticipate our every move and all of that, when that doesn’t happen, it can be a deal breaker or at least a frustration and a poor reflection on your brand. And so doing the work of carefully auditing, watching your analytics, understanding where things might be breaking down or not following through and aggressively working to fix that, to see where it is and what’s going on and where it is not following having those Frank conversations with your customers and getting that feedback, whereas a hiccup, where’s the point where are we missing something and doing the work it takes to continue to tell a really clear, good coherent and consistent story throughout your experience. Yeah.
Elisabeth Bohlmann (26:21):
And it oftentimes goes also into, you know, is the type of product that you’re looking at billing. Is it the right one? For example, sometimes we have clients that come to us and say, Hey, we want to build a progressive web app. Or, you know, I mean, our, our service is, uh, you know, web-based, but, uh, if you look at their analytics, you see that most people are accessing their current solution from their mobile phone. So maybe you might have contemplated that a mobile app might make sense, but it can also happen the other way around that. We have clients that say, Hey, you know, I want a mobile app and I want it for iOS and I want it for Android. And, you know, and they think they should be billing all of this together and then went through kind of initial conversations with them. You realize that they haven’t really thought about how the subscription models, uh, when it comes to payments work with the app store and with Google play store and how that might actually affect their overall ideas of the business model. So, yeah, I think again, you know, democratizing knowledge is really something that I’m fond of, and that is so important when building, or when investing really in any kind of technology product,
Mark Whitlock (27:22):
Elisabeth, give us a primer, take us into the process of building UX. What are the basic building blocks that everybody’s got to know? And, and designers have got to understand so that a UX can, can be built well educated.
Elisabeth Bohlmann (27:41):
The first part of my answer, I think is that there are many different ways of conducting UX research of leveraging UX activities to build the right product. And that’s actually good news because it means that really, according to what you’re trying to build, there’s probably something very specific you can do to make sure you’re doing it the right way, but let’s start with the beginning. So, um, first of all, uh, there needs to be some kind of discovery phase. You need to take a step back and make sure that you transfer all the knowledge that you have gathered to the UX UI team that you’re working with. They have to be as good as as experts as you are really. And they can then extend to that and add their own knowledge, their own ways of conducting research to really make sure that you’ll have the same common ground and that we all know where we’re starting with.
Elisabeth Bohlmann (28:31):
And again, this is oftentimes where it also makes sense to include the marketing folks. Then what you do next is starting to build out the information architecture. This is really the backbone of any kind of product. And it’s not as simple as just, you know, the site map of a website. It’s really, you know, the entire user flow of what’s going to happen. One of the interesting things here is that when you’re mapping out that user journey, think a little bit about the potential friction points, the pain points, because there’s not going to be just the happy path, meaning that everything goes well, but there is going to be a friction path as well. So contemplate that so that you have those different paths, then you really start working on, you know, low-fi, wireframes really mapping this out still without any content, without anything in particularly yet, but to make sure that yeah, you start visualizing the quantity of screens and what you’re going to try to put on what kind of screen and so on.
Elisabeth Bohlmann (29:27):
This is actually one of the phases that typically we do the initial round of user research with where we just validate, um, already, you know, if the wireframes, if the information architecture that we mapped out, if that resonates with people sometimes, uh, you know, particularly when we have worked with more complex products that might already have existing users sometimes even have to start with, you know, are all the different menu items, like, do they make sense for the users? You know, like, or would they go from a, to B and would have to, you know, do 10 clicks to do so. So that’s what I was referring to earlier when I said there are UX tactics, such as tree testing, such as Korea testing that go very specific to, you know, different items that you might to validate with users with. And then after the lo-fi you go into the Hi-Fi, you know, start working on the visuals again, oftentimes, um, uh, together with the marketing teams who might already have worked on branding on, uh, you know, any visuals in general for the product or for anything kind of surrounding this. So we will start then applying this to the tech product with all the necessary best practices, including building UI kits, making sure that this is easy for developers then to implement throughout the entire tech product and so on. And again, go back to validating this with users, build clickable prototypes, um, do remote, you know, moderated interviews, walk them through what you’re trying to do here.
John Farkas (30:51):
So it’s really important that you have those listening channels set up, that you understand what is actually happening as people move through your world. And you are, you have ways in places where you’re able to monitor where you’re able to hear, where you’re able to get feedback in ways that help you continue to sharpen the saw and refine and improve that experience all the way through and ensuring that what they see on the front end, in the context of who you are from a marketing presence, matches what they get through their sales process, through the onboarding through when they begin to engage your product and how that functions and move forward through your universe. It’s really a critical component to building trust and building the kind of fans and evangelists that you want that help amplify your market presence.
Elisabeth Bohlmann (31:49):
Yeah. And also, I think one thing that you said earlier, you don’t have to get it perfect the first way round, but you have to get a pretty right, because if someone had a negative experience with a software product, it’s really hard to get that person to use it again, because that really sticks with you. You know, if it’s really tedious, if it’s, if, if you don’t understand that if, if, if it crashes, I mean, unless you have to use it because someone makes you, you know, because it’s part of your job or so, um, I mean, really people are going to abandon that and there are so many different tech products out there that, uh, yeah, you really have to make sure that everything that you’re building a solid
Anna Grimes (32:46):
Elisabeth, thank you for taking the time to come and talk with us about this. It’s such an important topic when you said it’s very hard to get them to come back and, and use some app. I immediately thought of three different apps that are just sitting on my phone that I should just erase because I started, I was like all excited and, and now I’m like, no, you’ve got to jump through some more hoops to make me want to try this again. But thank you so much again, and lots of great information that, um, um, I know that a lot of people are going to find valuable,
Elisabeth Bohlmann (33:19):
Thanks to all of you really for also inviting me to this conversation and really, you know, looking with me at the other side of the picture. I think, you know, if we all work together closely, uh, then yeah, we’ll be building a lot more exciting products than we already are.
Anna Grimes (33:33):
Magic.
Mark Whitlock (33:36):
Magic indeed. Come on over to studiocmo.com/059 that’s studiocmo.com/059. That’s where you’ll find the show notes for this episode. And there at our show notes, we’re going to talk about UX. We’re going to give you the outline that Elisabeth gave us for the process of UX. We’re going to link out to some articles on our website about user design and the customer experience from top to bottom. And we’re also going to link out to Elisabeth’s music. Uh, Elisabeth, how do you pronounce the name of your new record?
Elisabeth Bohlmann (34:12):
Fuego en el corazón negro
Mark Whitlock (34:12):
Exactly phenomenal new music from Elisabeth and her band. You know, we’ve talked about customer experience today and that dovetails perfectly with the three core tenants of Studio CMO and the agency behind it. We say that we must understand our buyer’s problems, lead with an empathetic understanding, and always make the buyer the hero. We’ll see you next time on Studio CMO.
Mark Whitlock (34:43):
Studio CMO is produced by Golden Spiral: market positioning and demand generation for HealthTech. We are an agency dedicated to help you realize your market potential. Our music is from Bigger Story Music, a BMG music library. Whatever story you’re trying to tell, Bigger Story has the perfect music to make it better. Really. Check them out at biggerstorymusic.com.